


It Will Set You Free

by black_ink_tide



Series: It Was A Heartbeat [3]
Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, F/M, Revenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-20
Updated: 2011-07-20
Packaged: 2017-10-21 14:05:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 11,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/black_ink_tide/pseuds/black_ink_tide
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to 'It Was A Heartbeat' and 'No Matter How Loudly You Call'</p><p>Fenris hunts for the missing child and revenge. Hawke and Anders carve out a life in Kirkwall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She has good days. It is a blessing, one of the few cherished bits of happiness Anders has now. There are beautiful sunny days when she is lucid and bright and funny just as she was years before. They’ve made a life out of those good days.

They live together in a small plain house halfway between the clinic and the old estate. For nearly a year, it had been like living with a child just discovering her magic. There were outbursts, small fires… she blinded him once for a week. But Anders remained been doggedly patient with her. Even Justice had been quiet and still in those times, perhaps showing dutiful respect for a mage in distress.

Her name had shielded and protected him… and allowed them to continue working in the clinic. She could never quite find the strength or the stomach to go with him on the jobs at night, what she now called his extra-curricular activities… On those nights, she would often stay in the clinic herself if home was just too quiet. There was always someone in need of healing in Darktown. And while she didn’t have quite his prowess at healing, she was good… and more than that, she gave people hope.

She has good days. Yes. But today, tonight, is not one of them.

It is a child. He can tell. Anytime a child is involved it triggers her. She becomes lost and he can do nothing to bring her back… not until she finds her own way.

Pushing open the clinic door, he sees her hunched in the far corner, something small and wrapped held close to her chest.

“Hawke…”

She cranes her long elegant neck and looks up at him, her face pale and damp and… utterly lost.

“I tried…” she says, and he hears the distance in her voice, “he was breathing when I found him. Maybe if you were here…" she looks away from him, “they left him in a basket outside.”

He kneels beside her, knees cracking, and pulls back the corner of a rough linen blanket swaddled around the child in her arms. He is small. Premature. His eyes are closed, as if asleep. Anders reaches in gently to feel for a pulse he knows will not be there, a gesture for her benefit.

“I thought it was him,” she says, nuzzling the small head, “I thought… oh, he came back to me! After all this time. He came back to me, just as he was. Like magic.”

He strokes her hair with a heavy hand, “Let me take him, Marian.”

“Please…” she shakes her head, “Just let me…”

Pretend.

It is unspoken, shameful… macabre. But he can’t deny her… at least for a little while.

“Why would they leave him?” she asks, seeing that he did not force her to give him up, “He’s so perfect.”

“They were probably scared. Maker, the mother. Do you think it was-"

“Sod the mother!” she snaps, “It’s her fault!”

He levels his gaze with her, and says with as much authority as his tired body permits, “No. No it’s not.”

“You don’t know that.”

Anders sits across from her, his back sore and stiff, watching her rock the baby in her arms.

His body feels every one of his thirty-seven years, and then some. Though he tries to keep vigil with her, at some point, exhaustion wins out. He is only aware of this this when he is awakened from dreamless sleep by the warmth of her body curling up next to his as they lie together on the dusty floor of the clinic.

“It’s nearly dawn,” she says, tracing the shape of the thick corded scar above his heart through his shirt. She answers his unasked question, “I gave him to Sebastian.”

“You did what?” it comes out harsher than he intends, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“You know I don’t believe any of their bullshit,” her tone is casual, “But they do a nice funeral. Nicer than anything I could do for him any way.”

He says nothing, but stares up at the dark ceiling.

“You’re too old to sleep on the ground like this,” she yawns, “You’ll throw your back out again.”

She speaks lightly as if what happened tonight is normal. It is anything but.

He feels Justice scrabble inside beneath her hand. He spent the night assembling what would soon bring about an end to of this illusory status quo (he could smell the sewer on himself, even now, regardless of how he scrubbed himself raw before coming here) and she had spent the night with a stranger’s dead newborn in her arms.

It couldn’t go on like this… not with the pair of them hosting their dark companions, _Vengeance_ and _Grief_. They had made a life out of good days… but nights like these make him question that life entirely.

“So are you,” he says finally, trying to sound level and blasé. She is already asleep.


	2. Chapter 2

Standing in the rain still as stone, I do not feel the cold. I’ve watched him for hours.

Years. Empty, often seemingly pointless years. Dead ends. Lies. Distractions and burdens and… and now, here, on a rainy night in the middle of nowhere on the border of Antiva… here he is. And here am I. And it is nearly done. But not yet.

 _Nearly finished_. The thought is a balm to my soul.

He is drunk. Dozing beside a dismal little fire, out of his armor which I know he sold long ago. I have followed him here after ghosting him like, unnoticed, unobserved. I know his life.

How could this man share her blood? How is it even possible?

He shared the blood he spilled. His own sister. His nephew.

My son.

 _It’s nearly done_ , I touch the wet, threadbare piece of linen tied around my wrist, _nearly finished_.


	3. Chapter 3

The next night, he doesn’t find her at home or at the clinic. She is sitting in the Hanged Man drunk, but happy.

She is there with Merrill, who she allows to braid brightly colored ribbons into her long black hair. Her cheeks are flushed and her eyes dance.

She beams when she sees him enter, “I meant to leave a note…”

“I thought you might be here, love,” he kisses the top of her head stiffly, “Where are the others?”

“Out. Doing hero business. That Aveline is pretty magnificent. Merrill here decided to stay with me. How’s your back?”

He exhales, sitting heavily beside her, “Fine. Yours?”

 _They had slept on the floor.  
He had dreamt of nothing.  
She had called him Fenris once and kissed him without waking._

“Never better,” she runs her finger tip around the damp lip of her tankard and says cheerfully, “Anders, let’s adopt.”

He winces, sensing tension despite her bright tone, “Adopt?”

“A baby. Let’s just adopt one.”

Merrill’s hands still in her hair for just a moment, then she smiles and says, “I think that sounds lovely. There are quite a few elven children without anyone to claim them in the alienage. Back home they’d be raised by the community, but here… well, they don’t do that here.”

“Exactly!” Marian took another sip of ale, “Think about it. You and I are, quite possibly, the most infertile couple in all of Kirkwall, if not the entirety of the Free Marches… what with the whole tainted blood thing on your behalf, and the whole being butchered thing I’ve got going for me.”

“Hawke,” he warns, but it’s all too late anyway. Merrill glances at him, but quickly looks away again, focusing on the silky strands between her fingers.

“Oh. Sorry. Warden Business… I forgot,” she pulled one of her newly plaited braids over her shoulder, twisting the end around her finger, “There are so many kids in need of a good home.”

“And you think we have a good home?”

“In our own way, yeah,” she shrugs, “As good as we can do.”

“Two wanted apostates living in sin in Kirkwall?”

“One of whom is harboring a Fade spirit and has a tendency to glow and break things. Sounds damn right idyllic to me,” she doesn’t look at him now.

“Why don’t you get a kitten?” Merrill offers, glancing up at Anders again, “Kittens are nice.”

Hawke rubs the base of her hand against her eye. She chuckles thickly, “Think of it… our very own bouncing bundle of kitten joy. That would make it all better, wouldn’t it?”

The weariness in her voice pulls at his heart, and reaches to put a hand over hers on the table.

She pulls away.


	4. Chapter 4

I stand over the reeking body of Carver Hawke in the dark.

This room smells of him; stale cooking fat and sweat and rancid alcohol sweated through unwashed skin. He is significantly fatter than he was when I last saw him – I watch the thick pulse of blood in his bloated throat. It is so quiet I can hear every drop of clean rainwater drip from my fingers onto the floor.

That corrupt order hid him well. They absorbed his absence, lied, did not punish him but merely let him disappear. Had she been anything other than a mage… had he done this to a normal woman of her standing, his head would have been on a pike.

The magic in her blood damned her, and our child, but freed her sodding brother.

My hand is already at his throat. His eyes snap open, bloodshot and glassy. He pushes and swats at me weakly. Pathetic. I squeeze. The bitter copper scent of blood rises as metal claws puncture the sallow skin of his damned fat throat.

“F-Fenris?” he manages.

I cannot hold myself back for much longer. I know that. I feel it as almost an observer, detached. I will kill this man soon. I think of nothing but the cradle in the corner of our bedroom that was never used and the dream of a small unseen foot kicking against my hand through the skin of his mother.

“S-stop!”

I lean in, all of my weight on his chest. His ribs bend beneath me. I could tear out his heart with my teeth. “Why should I?”

“I… tell you… where… is…”

 _The body_. I relax my grip, but do not pull away.

“Talk.”

“It wasn’t my fault!” he wheezes, rolling eyes white, face purple, “The lyrium… I was… oh, Maker… it wasn’t-“

Excuses. “You took him. Where? Where is the body?”

“Did she live? I heard-“

“No. She died that night.”

“Oh, Maker…”

I squeeze, he gasps and chokes, “Did you bury him? Burn him?”

He grips my wrist, his filthy fingers closing around the linen tied there.

The lyrium in my skin sizzles. He struggles, a rabbit in the snare.

“Alive!” he gurgles, “Alive!”

I am the only light in the room, a nightmare sent to rend souls, “No! You lie! To save your hide--”

“I… I realized what I was… in the middle of it. She had… she ruined… what she had done to our family… but… the lyrium… it was like I woke up. I woke up over her, and I…” he looks up at me, dark hair matted to his forehead, “She was dead. I killed my own sister. And I held it... her baby in my arms. He… cried. He was so little… didn’t even look human.”

I pull back at this, my heart hammering in the cage of my chest.

“Where is he, Carver?”

“I ran. Took him with me. What did I know about taking care of a baby? One that little? He got sick, shaking and burning up… I took him to a whorehouse… I mean, they have babies in there all the time, right? That’s what I thought. They… took care of him. I left him there.”

“The whores have him? Still?”

“I don’t know! Maybe. It’s been years…” he sags beneath me, his confession spent. He tells me where the whore house is between this place and Kirkwall.

He describes the whore who nursed him. An elf with long red hair.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he says, then with finality, “Just do it, Fenris.”

I do not hesitate. Nor do I find the pleasure in killing him I thought I would. It is a mundane gesture; I pull his heart out in pieces. I burn the house with him lying there on his narrow bed.

That night, for the first time in years, I run back toward the City of Chains.


	5. Chapter 5

“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him in the dark, “That was rude, tonight, what I said.”

“I’m sorry, too.”

“For what?”

“That I can’t. I can’t give that to you.”

“We could do it that way… we could adopt--”

“It’s too late,” he sits up, the sheets pooling in his lap.

“Anders, what have you done?”

She knows. Somehow, sitting in their dark room, she knows what he’s set into motion.

 _Clever Hawke_.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Will you die?”

His silence answers her.

“Anders...”

“They will kill you because of me. You should leave--“

“Where else would I go?”

He doesn’t have an answer.

“It’s comforting, actually,” she rests her chin on his shoulder, “I’ll see him, again. Well… maybe. I hope so. I hope we can be together.”

Anders tries to believe that _we_ includes him. He ghosts his fingertips across the back of her hand and her bare inner thigh, trailing warm blue sparks on her skin and stares into the darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

It is nearly mid-day. A small herd of children, human and elven, play in the grass beneath the billowing sails of sheets and diapers strung on a laundry line above their heads.

It is in a separate building detached from the whorehouse that the women, and their children, actually live. And it is clear that I am unwelcome. I remain on the outer edge of a low wooden fence around the yard.

“You a eunuch?” one woman holding a small baby against her bare breast asks, eying me suspiciously.

“Not with that voice he isn’t.”

I turn. An elven woman with long red hair streaked with grey is leaning against the frame of the door to the house, “And he’s not looking for business or pleasure, are you sweetheart?”

She doesn’t move. Neither do I.

“No.”

“Well what is he looking for then?” the nursing woman looks back at the elf, “Do you know him?”

She smiles, faint lines creasing the delicate skin around her eyes, “I’ve been waiting for him, I think. Let’s talk outside, yeah? Around the corner. I can’t leave the grounds with you.”

“I understand.”

She disappears inside. I wait for her, standing at the far corner of the low fencing. The sunshine feels warm on the skin of my face and I close my eyes. My son is not one of those playing in the yard. I know that. Perhaps he is no longer here… it would make sense. If he yet lives--

It feels like a lifetime since anyone attempted to pick my pocket.

I feel a gentle shift, deft fingers moving the fabric of my pocket at my side. Whoever it is is being exceedingly careful, but lacks the finer skill to really pull this off. I wait a fraction of a moment longer.

He is in.

I turn, grasping the wrist of my attempted pickpocket. The wrist is significantly smaller than I anticipated. Delicate. Soft.

A child. A boy with black hair trimmed nearly to the scalp on the sides but longer on top, a thick stripe of glossy hair from forehead to nape. Fierce green eyes stare up at me rebelliously from a small tan face.

My own eyes look back at me and I nearly let go out of shock.

“See you’ve already met.”

I look up at the woman who has divested herself of her dressing gown. She is in a russet shift, cinched at the waist. The sun reflects off of her pale bare shoulders, the filigree mark of her house branded just above her left breast. In her hand is a small satchel, which rests against her thigh as she stands.

The child jerks away from me, but I hold him, feeling the small bones of his wrist and hand in my own.

“Fox,” she says softly. The boy stills and looks up at her.

“Fox?” I say his name reflexively. He looks at my face, defiant, but makes no sound.

“Come here, my love,” she crouches and holds her arms out to him. Reluctantly, lest I lose him again, I release my grip. He snatches his hand from me. He vaults himself over the low fence with a swift grace that takes me by surprise and goes to her where he is quickly enveloped in her soft arms and lifted, his weight on her hip. From his perch he scowls at me under thick dark brows.

“Yes. Fox. Aptly named,” she says to me, “Silent, swift and clever… and one of the sneakiest little buggers I’ve ever met.”

At this, his scowl breaks into a smile for her and he buries his face against her neck.

“And yours, by the looks of it,” she finishes, stroking a hand down his back. She studies me with a skilled eye.

I stare at the boy in disbelief. He is human, yet the resemblance between us is uncanny.

“He doesn’t speak,” she says simply, “He never has.”

“Never?”

“No. Not a word. He hears perfectly. He was quite poorly when he came here… his throat just never got strong enough to make a sound. But it’s all right… he does well for himself.”

“As I saw earlier,” I pat my pocket.

He smirks at that, the bugger.

“He speaks with his hands, too. When he needs to. You’ve come for him, then?” she says it bluntly without preamble, “To take him with you?”

“Yes.”

“Took long enough.”

“He was hidden.”

“Well hidden, yes. But you came.“

“Why…” I find difficulty looking away from him, but set my gaze on her, “Why trust me?”

She purses her lips, “Not very long after Fox arrived, we had a girl join us. A Ferelden refugee who’d never been able to make ends meet, she’d moved here from Kirkwall. Business was slow one night and we stayed up talking. She told me the saddest story. It was like a fairy story… the Champion of Kirkwall had her baby cut from her belly. She slept the sleep of the dead, but was saved by the touch of magic. The Wolf who had always loved her hunted for revenge and for the missing child. Now, I’m not great believer in coincidence. Fate maybe. What’s the difference, really?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. The girl told me that she thought the child was dead, had to have been. But I looked at Fox that night as he slept beside me, and I thought…” she looks at him now and not at me, “you do look a bit like the son of a hawk and a wolf.”

His face sets itself then into lines far more mature than his five years warrants. He is proud.

“What’s your name? Surely it’s not The Wolf.”

“Fenris.”

“This is your Da, Fox,” she smiles, “Fenris. You’re going to go with him. On an adventure.”

She begins to walk to the line of the fence, the satchel’s straps over her arm.

He holds tight to her, and I see a momentary flicker of apprehension in his large eyes, noticing that his dark lashes are damp; I did not see him cry. His face is otherwise set, stoic and unreadable. He certainly didn’t get that from Hawke, who’s every emotion read on her face as clear as morning light.

She hands me the satchel, containing his few belongings and some extra clothing.

“Yes. A… an adventure,” I don’t know how to speak to a child, “You like adventure?”

The boy nods, setting his jaw forward.

She kisses him, and whispers into his ear before handing him bodily to me over the fence.

I take him from her, our hands brushing. I clumsily settle his weight and bare legs against the hard lines of my armor. He wraps his arms around my neck and holds on to me. He smells of dirt and porridge and boy and faintly of her perfume. He squeezes my neck, trying to secure better purchase, and in that moment he becomes real to me. My son. Fox. Alive.

Without thought, I take one of his bare feet in my hand and squeeze very lightly, remembering.

He jerks the foot away from me, giving me a wry glare. I see Hawke in him then, inside the face that looks so much like a translation of my own in human blood, human bone.

“What is your name?” I ask her, feeling my arms shake slightly.

“Lara.”

“Thank you, Lara.” Courteous and insufficient.

She smiles, showing missing teeth, “It was my pleasure.”


	7. Chapter 7

“Anders?”

There is no response. He is sitting right there. Awake. Alive.

But he doesn’t answer her.

He doesn’t remember hitting the wall beside her face so hard that the plaster crumbled the week before. She knew he really didn’t when he woke in the morning staring at his shattered hand like it was a rancid cut of meat and not a part of him.

She had taken the flesh and bone between her hands and felt all the broken edges inside of him. She loved him still. The bones and the marrow and the ghost. All of it. He let her work, his arm heavy in her lap, and he looked up at her with brown eyes gone grey and tired. She straightened the bones and eased the pain. Neither said a word. There was nothing to say.

He doesn’t remember because it isn’t him. He’s gone. And it happens more and more often.

He will not remember leaving the house. He will not be able to answer her when she asks what he did, where he went, whose blood this is under his nails and in his hair…

He won’t lie. He just won’t remember.

There is a ghost inside of him, haunting the house.

“Come back.”

He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t hear her. When he leaves her alone like this, she has nothing but memories and the ache of her empty arms.

He stayed with her. Anders kept her safe in the dark, but he could never really bring her back into the light.

And now he’s lost in the dark too.


	8. Chapter 8

I watch him unnoticed. His eyes are glued to the dancing flames, brow furrowed in concentration.

He is a Hawke, no question about that; I see it in the dreamy distant look on his face… the same look that Marian had when thinking about a place she’d been and couldn’t go to again. Lothering. _Home_.

“Do you… like being named Fox?”

He looks at me, and nods approvingly.

“It’s a good name. I like foxes. They’re very… fast.”

He smiles weakly and picks at a scab on his knee.

I dream about Marian for the first time in years that night. I can still feel her skin on my fingertips when I wake. Fox sleeps nearby, curled into a snug ball beneath his blanket.

Our son sleeps within arms reach. I touch his shoulder before falling asleep again, foolishly, just to be sure that he is real.

I am relieved to discover that he keeps a good pace, and does not complain as we continue on. His legs are short but strong and he is lightfooted... moving as silently as his namesake when he desires.

Ideally we could stop and rest more often, take a day or two to rest. There have been days when he has nearly fallen asleep on his feet rather than turn and ask me to stop.

I've kept him fed, and safe, and healthy on this journey. I know his signs for basic needs... which is largely all he conveys to me. _Hunger. Thirst. Tired. Hurt._ He is guarded in a way that still takes me by surprise... it's admirable even. A child as young as Fox has every right to be afraid of the beasts and the night and the stranger with his eyes who took him from the only home he'd ever known without warning or much apparent cause. Yet he shows no fear.

But he is a child, still. And as we near the border of the Free Marches, he sways on his feet, exhausted. I scoop him up. He finds his place in my arms. He knows where to rest his head, wrap his arms, how to hold on to me without hurting himself on my armor.

I hold him, one arm curled beneath his thighs.

When he grows heavier and his legs dangle limply, I know he has fallen asleep. Safe and trusting his father's arms to guard him in his sleep.

I have overheard in the villages where we restock supplies that the stalemate in Kirkwall is slipping towards breaking. Rumors. _Always rumors_. I push quicker south, and as we get closer, I almost feel her. Something tangible. Real for the first time in so many long years. I bury my nose in Fox's glossy black hair and smell her. I allow myself to miss her, really miss her, because I have real hope that I will not have to miss her forever for much longer.

I do not know what awaits us. The last time I saw Marian… she was broken and mad, and clinging desperately to the abomination. I could do nothing then.

I carry Fox toward Kirkwall and a home that I choose to believe still exists.


	9. Chapter 9

Hawke isn’t beside him when the chantry flares red against the night sky.

Anders neither followed nor walked beside her. He had gone ahead as she slipped behind, slipped away. Without her, the human part of him feels lost from its moorings.

Vengeance walks this body to the edge of the world.

Vengeance hits the butt of Anders’ staff against the ground.

Vengeance speaks.

It is Vengeance. Vengeance in ligament and tendons, the thinning cartilage, eyes and breath. Everything is clear in that red illumination.

Anders sees the flare of red, the color of change, of the horizon at dawn. He sees it, feels the burst of hot air blow against his face. It is a sea breeze, coming in, and he stands on a cliff watching an ominous red sun sink beneath the end of all that he has known. _Day into Night, Night into Day._

He does not hear Sebastian’s cry, or his prayers. He is deaf to the world.

He can feel a separation inside. The edges between selves becoming defined. Justice’s voice inside the only sound in his brain. _A martyr cannot outlive his cause, Anders_.

Through the haze, he hears one clear word. A name. A light in the dark.

“ _Hawke_.”

He hears Sebastian say it again, “Hawke was inside the chantry.”

The Prince. He kneels on the ground, head dipped forward. He invokes her. A spirit.

“Shouldn’t have come with us… she can’t fight. Couldn’t. She said she was going to the Chantry… to be with the children. She thought they’d be afraid.”

“You let her go,” Anders voice is jagged.

“It was safer there than anywhere else! Safe for her!” Sebastian seethes, unable to even look at him. He makes a fist around the fine white ash that has collected in his upturned palm, “She was good. You killed her. _Hawke_. She was inside! She was inside!”

The edge of the world crumbles under his feet, and Anders falls toward a churning sea.

 _She went to die with them_.

He sees the blur of templars and mages out of the corner of his eye. A fight he is no longer in. All that exists now is Sebastian and Anders… what’s left of him. He doesn’t fight Sebastian but he does bite back the spirit for a final time as he struggles to the surface reflexively. _A martyr cannot outlive his cause_.

He feels the blade enter his side once, twice, three times. Imprecise. Meant to hurt, to bleed him out slowly… so that he feels it. _We are all killers here. We know how to kill._

He is numb. _Hawke was inside._

Aveline. Their Leader. She is there, pulling Sebastian off of his body. _I hope we can be together._


	10. Chapter 10

Lightning cracks across the sky, illuminating my path back to the cave. The rain is hot and heavy and I taste the thickness of a Free March summer in every breath. I push my hair away from my eyes where it hangs limp and wet.

Fox waits for me under the shelter of the cave were we will sleep tonight before pushing towards Kirkwall in the morning. I think I can see him, standing at the mouth, keen hunter-eyes trained on the electric sky.

Our dinner hangs at my side, a fat unlucky rabbit, its still warm haunches thumping against my thigh as I walk.

A crack of light and a rumble of thunder and I can see him clearly again. He sees me, too.

His shoulders quiver convulsively and I walk faster. The storm has scared him… he fears nothing until now… I think. I hadn’t even considered… I left him alone.

“Fox!”

I’m nearly there. His hands cover his mouth and he still shakes, his eyes locked onto me.

I launch myself the rest of the way, dropping the rabbit and kneeling in front of him, taking both his arms between my hands.

“It’s just a storm,” I say, “Just rain and light.”

He looks at me, still jerking silently. His eyes smile.

The boy is not quaking with fear at a summer storm.

He is laughing. At me.

“What?” I ask, sitting back on my haunches.

He reaches toward me, pushing white hair out of my face as one solid wet clump. It has grown untended and hangs unevenly near my shoulders dry… as wet as it is now, it looks ridiculous. _Like a shaggy-dog_ , he informs me. Funny enough to make Fox positively spin with laughter. I’ve not had a reason to care about it in quite some time. I smile despite myself at seeing him so delighted.

He pushes it away from the other side of my face as well, and I feel his fingers on my cheek.

“Well, you’re not looking much better yourself,” I say, reaching up to rub the sides of his head. Once closely cropped, his hair is starting to grow out at different lengths, and when dry it sticks out straight in all directions, causing him to look permanently shocked despite his standard expression of intentional disinterest.

He giggles silently and I smile. I laugh.

Still shaking, he grabs my hair with both hands and tucks it behind my ears.

 _Better_ , he tells me.

“Thanks. Come on then,” I stand and walk back into the cave, retrieving the rabbit. I start to prepare it over an oiled cloth near the small cooking fire, “I thought you were scared.”

My ever brave son makes a defiant scoffing gesture and follows me. He shakes the water from his hair and then sits attentively at my side, watching my hands work, handing me a skinning knife.

Free of the gauntlets, I look at my hands and his; They are a smaller set of my own, soft but dexterous.

“My hair used to look like yours,” I say, skinning the rabbit, “I’ve been told that when I was a boy it was black at pitch.”

He looks up at me, studying. I can see his hands. He asks what happened.

“These,” I reply, touching one of the markings on my chin with a clean knuckle.

I stop what I am doing. He traces one marking on my arm with a small fingertip, following it to my wrist.

 _Were you scared?_

I scoff, mirroring his earlier rejection of fear. This earns me a grin.

 _Do they hurt?_

“Sometimes.”

Outside the mouth of our cave, the sky flares again, but not with white lightening. Red. The sky fills with red light. I can smell the magic in it, though not with any actual sense in my body. Perhaps the markings. They feel it... and so, then, do I. I push Fox behind my back instinctively, but I feel him poke his head around my side to see. There is no sound. No impact.

Everything returns to normal again after a painfully still moment, just dark rain on a dark sky…

But it is like a warning flare… a sign of distant destruction.

A red sky over Kirkwall.

I say _Hawke_ , and wish she could answer me now, here. But the only sound is the perpetual rain and my own jagged breath.

I feel Fox move beside me. He makes the sign of a bird in flight. A hawk.

 _Fly, Hawke_.


	11. Chapter 11

“Not like this!”

“He killed Hawke!”

Anders hears their voices from far below. The battle has stilled around them. The air is thick and wet in his lungs. Rolling his head to the side, he sees her standing there. _Hawke_. A ghost in ash like snow falling. She stands beyond the bodies of mages and templars, dressed in black, soft and beautiful, the edges of the worlds blurring together as he fades.

“He murdered her!”

“I can’t let you, Sebastian. He will be punished, I swear, but I cannot allow you to do it.”

Hawke steps toward him, her feet in soft shoes, not boots, not armor. Hips round and languid. Her skirt collects the dust. Gentle lavender light dances around her hands, up her bare arms the way a ship’s mast collects that ethereal light in a storm… unearthly, alien. _Hawke_. Her hands are charred and red beneath the light.

“Heal yourself, Anders!” Aveline's voice, Aveline's hands on his face.

Something is tilted against his lips, cold liquid unwelcome and unexpected in his mouth and throat.

 _No_.

He coughs. A strong hand on his broken jaw forces him to look away from Hawke, his sight set instead on the smoke and stars above him, past Aveline's frazzled ginger hair.

The hand pulls away, dropping him, they all pull away.

Her face is there, above him. So real. _Hawke_. Eyes like gems.

“I got them out before it happened,” she says, her voice perfectly calm, “You didn’t kill any of the children, Anders. They're alive. Their blood is not on your soul, okay?”

She takes one of his hands in her own and lifts it to her cheek. His hand and hers are coated with his tainted blood.

She is real. The others see her too.

“H-Hawke, you... you're... I-“

“Sebastian, don’t,” she warns, her gaze snapping from Anders to The Prince. He sees the strong line of her jaw set, crouched over him protectively. In profile he sees her whole -- the Champion she was years before. No scar. No lost child. No fear. Whole. She is breathtaking even as the breath chokes past the blood in his throat.

“Hawke… we have to go,” Aveline kneels beside him but looks only at Hawke.

“Yes, you do.”

“I don’t know what to do, Hawke.”

“Yes you do. You always do the right thing, Aveline. You’ll do the right thing now.”

Aveline reaches across his body and takes Hawke’s hand, “I missed you.”

“You beauty,” Hawke smiles at her, “Go on.”

“I’m sorry… about…” Aveline looks at him… no. Through him.

“Goodbye, Aveline.”

“Goodbye, Hawke,” the warrior rises and leads her army away, taking Sebastian with her though he snarls and fights to go back. To finish him. To watch him die.

“Do you want to go, love? Or stay here. It’s your decision…” Her voice is low, only for him, “she’s fighting for the templars. She can’t do it any other way.”

 _She saved the children to save his soul_. The fight rumbles in the ground under his back. Explosions and bodies hitting with heavy dull thuds and cracked skulls. He deserves to die. She offers to lay down beside him and wait, to die there with him.

Instead he digs his hand into his side and heals the damage done by Sebastian’s rage enough to stand.

To run.


	12. Chapter 12

There is a war now, but the fight has bled out of the city.

Kirkwall is ash and rubble.

We stay there for just two days. There is nothing for us. We arrived too late.

Fox and I go unnoticed as the rest of the city limps by, some trying to pick what can be salvaged from the debris, some just passing by with the haunted vague expression of survivors caught in the morass of aftermath. Bodies are being burned day and night near the docks, ash floating out in a somber column, carried to the corners of the world by the tide.

I wonder wordlessly in Hawke is there, drifting at sea or like a feather on the air.

Aveline is Viscount. She has her work cut out for her… but her name seems to be uttered with hope in the darker corners where Fox and I walk. I listen in, piecing together a version of the events that seem plausible.

The Abomination ended it all, forcing Aveline to side with the templars in an attempt to balance peace, control what was beginning to feel a lot like genocide… I hear little of Hawke. Some say she died in the explosion, while other people claim ardently that they know the children she carried and lead out of the building to a safe location as if she knew what was coming. Others said she resurrected the Abomination with powerful blood magic and together they ran out of the city to spread the mage revolution like wildfire through Thedas.

Sebastian leads a charge of volunteers, and they are already cutting a bloody swath through the mages that run from the wreckage like rats from a burning ship.

I stare at the front door of the estate where Hawke used to live as if it will reveal secrets to me. The door hangs crookedly on its hinges. Fox shifts anxiously beside me in the courtyard. He’s hungry.

I will not take him inside. That is a tomb.

I take him to the makeshift market that has sprung up in Hightown and buy an oatcake and a small tumbler of milk for him for a few coins. We sit side by side in the shade while he eats. Absently, I place my hand on the back of his head.

They are all gone, save Aveline and Donnic. No one knows my face and there is a quiet comfort in that.

This city will rebuild, reform, but it is not where we need to be.

Before we leave, I find myself drawn to the chantry courtyard.

A memorial has flowered there… white candles burn inside red glass jars, there are notes and flowers that have wilted in the hot sun. A fence is hastily constructed, keeping the wandering populace from going too near the ruins.

 _What was it?_ Fox asks me, sidestepping a bloodstain on the pale flagstones.

I look at him, and brush a dusting of crumbs from the cake off of his cheek with my thumb.

“It was a chantry.”

He steps up onto a wooden crate left beside the fence, peering into the wreckage, _A what?_

My little heathen.

“It was a building where people went to pray to the Maker or seek shelter.”

 _What happened to it?_

“A fool started war.”


	13. Chapter 13

Three bodies hang from the branches of the tree, swaying gently, heads bent on crooked necks and shrouded. The sacks placed over their faces blaze with bloody _M’s_. He sees the letters, wet and fresh in the moonlight and knows that if he touched them, they would still be warm.

Mages.

 _Murdered_.

Anders leans heavily on his staff, staring up at them. One woman, two men.

Their blood on his hands and here he is being shuttled about with an armed escort.

“We have to cut them down,” Hawke turns to the assembled men and women dedicated to see them to the ship safely, her eyes fierce, “Light a fire.”

“Messere… we must press on--”

“We can’t leave them there,” Hawke’s voice is flinty.

Aveline chose the templars that night, and they became outlaws. Hunted. He is important now. A figure. A living martyr.. whatever that means. A rallying point for a rebellion that rages and limps and bleeds throughout Thedas. In the wake of everything, it was the underground movement that took them in and found them passage out of the Free Marches.

A ship waits in the port for them. For Anders and Hawke. To take them far from Kirkwall shrouded in night. Together.

He looks away from the bodies and sees her standing beside the burnt ruins of this dead family’s house. Nothing but ashes. There is a blade in her hand. She will not leave them here to rot.

Cold autumn air through the branches and into his bones which feel very close to the surface of his skin. A thin cry carries on the wind, a gust wheezing through the branches.

 _Trees turned to gallows_.

Hawke’s face is tight and thin but strong. The magic he’s seen her perform since that night… astounds him. In a lifetime of healing he’s never seen the like; it was saving the children from the chantry explosion (from him) that finally pulled her out of the mire of desperation. She is so strong, so perfect… powerful and balanced and yet and bound to him by this war. This cause. And maybe love. She says it, has said it… but he isn’t sure. Not ever. Not now. She barely touches him, save to help him clean and dress his wounds or to hold him still when a nightmare wracks him out of sleep.

He limps to the edge of the forest, boots cracking dry twigs and burnt tinder, pressing his hand against his side where three deep wounds that still bleed a little. He has refused to heal them entirely… maybe he’s trying to kill himself slowly, let his blood poison him, allow it to fester inside.

For whatever reason, she’s let him do it. Maybe she wants him to suffer, too.

At the edge of the trees, he retches into the dark. The heaving in his abdomen pulls something loose that had only just started to knit and the pain brings him to his knees.

The thin cry carries again, and it sounds more human. His body is weakening… has been for a long time. It can’t support the war inside much longer. Anders, Justice, Vengeance… whatever the fuck they are together. Still… Vengeance and Justice have been still since that night, which has made the last few days even more painful. There has been no reprieve. No--

The cry he hears is not the wind and his ears prick. It’s a baby. A baby is crying. _Get up…_ he fights against his deteriorating body… _get up!_

He calls out for Hawke, but his throat is too raw to make much sound (or if she does hear, she doesn’t come to him).

Nestled in the darkness of the forest, a tiny white body writhes. Completely bare, exposed to the elements, the infant girl screams into a night sky that refuses to answer.

He falls to his knees beside her, dropping his staff. He picks her up, feeling the angry tangle of scratches left all over her back by the dry fallen needles and weeds. He heals the soft skin without hesitation. The child of murdered mages. Left here like a changeling… left to die alone by some act of mutated mercy rather than be hanged with the rest of her family. Templar mercy.

 _This is my fault. Your family… your mother…_

He smells smoke, clean wood burning. Hawke’s fire.

“Shh… shh… you’re all right,” he unlatches the front of his coat with one hand and slips the baby inside, trying to warm her with the heat of his body, near his heart, “you’re going to be all right.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Five Years Later…**

 

They dared. All of them.

A meeting of mages, rebels in the night, in a secret place. She could taste them in the air, metallic adrenaline. Magic. Controlled and powerful and real. They had all come together, here, in secret. They dared to stand side by side.

They came to see Anders… and tonight, he is magnificent for them.

She’s not sure if he’s used magic or a charm to make himself look so healthy… or if it is just the energy of the night and the company and seeing them all there, mages, alive, fierce and refusing to surrender that’s suffused life into him. His cheeks are full, flush with wine and fire… not gaunt and grey as he has been often. His back is straight and shoulders set strong and wide and, Maker, she’s nearly forgotten what a tall man he is. She can smell the herbs of his soap, his hair clean and full and wild. His coat is open, and the neck of his shirt falls far enough from his throat that the thick scar over his heart catches the firelight, evidence that the body the houses the heart of the cause has been to the Void and back, and yet lives.

She sees him as a warrior, something she’s never seen before.

Hawke stands beside him, holding Nola who scans the assembled mages without apprehension.

They have raised her together these five years… as if it had always been meant for the three of them to find each other. The orphan of his war… she is now a tall, healthy, strong willed child… a far cry from the changeling. Though it was Hawke who had nursed and mothered her, using magic and instinct to quicken that life sustaining ability once again, Nola, flame haired and defiant, was truly her father’s daughter.

She was the link that bound them together, even as their relationship languished… their union nothing but emblematic. Beyond the symbolism, she did love him… but she was not _in love_ with him. Perhaps she never had been. She did not keep this fact from him. He knew. He never pressed the matter though it was clear to her that in his own mad way… he was in love. Still. Always.

Nola watches him that night with dark round eyes… and Hawke knows that she too sees the transformation in him.

She is far from the only child here. Other mages hold babies, children… a next generation. Anders looks from them to Nola, and in his face there is a fierce tenderness. She reaches for him and he takes her from Hawke, pausing in the exchange with his face very near her.

She feels his warm breath on her face, and without thinking she opens her mouth, breathing him in. She presses an earnest kiss against his lips. He rumbles, content and sensual, and kisses her back. It feels like the family she’s never quite been able to grasp, as he shifts their daughter to hold her in the crook of one arm to use the other hand to push back the glossy mass of Hawke’s hair and hold her, jaw and skull and soul, and kisses her again… as if he’s just rediscovered her, the kiss sparking life inside them both. It takes purposeful effort to pull away from her, and she staggers as he does. But he must. They came to see him.

He speaks to the mages from a small raised platform of earth, his voice whiskey smooth, holding Nola who calmly twists her fingers into his hair and listens to him. He speaks of freedom, validation, of loss, of hope… and for one night, not of violence. She thinks that maybe, that night, he sees something the others can’t.

Some stay that night… others feel the risk of assembly too great and begin their long journeys home in cover of darkness. Anders carries Nola to her own little tent and spends quite a bit of time settling her in, telling her a story and finally kissing her forehead as her eyelids grow heavy and her breathing becomes deep and even. Rabbit, Hawke’s newly imprinted mabari, snuffles beside her, watching him exit with wise amber eyes.

He comes to her by the fire, kissing the back of her neck and draping his long arms around her. Their fingers wind together, and for a while, they watch the flames in comfortable silence, his chin heavy on her shoulder.

Anders makes love to her on a bed of quilts in their tent. She touches him everywhere with open urgent hands, feeling him more hot and alive than she can rationally understand. He is a searing ember in her arms, in her body. She doesn’t hold back the throaty, carnal sounds that escape her throat as he brings her to the edge, throwing her head back and feeling him in her again and again and again… replying to each moan with his own. She’d nearly forgotten how he sounds chasing pleasure like this, in control and out of it… Anders had, in a previous life, been a sexual creature, and that had always been evident in the act. Abandon and instinct, and peace in the unlikeliest of places. He is real then, a real man, with his eyes closed and his hair loose and his jaw slack, open, buried to the hilt inside of her, breathing her name.

It is the first time in a long, long time and she is tight. Her hips, unaccustomed to being spread, ache in the joint of her pelvis… but the pleasure is only intensified by the pain and time and absence and when she comes, it is overwhelming. Her whole body trembles and she holds tight to him, panting. He stills inside of her, kissing her sweaty temple attentively until she resurfaces and begins rocking beneath him, restoring their rhythm.

They take their time, languidly, until finally he comes, both her scarred hands raked through his hair, his arms braced on either side of her head. It is too dark to see him, to watch his face, and she regrets that. Anders was always so beautiful in that moment… it was one of the few times she ever really saw _him_.

They fall asleep interlocked.

When she wakes, she is alone.

She never got to say goodbye to him. That was the strangest part. After all that… he was just gone.

He didn’t even leave a note. Not for her. He did leave one for the men, their guard… telling them not to look for him, that he wasn’t taken, he left.

It was time.

He instructed them to protect her and Nola, just as they had done for so well for so long. There was a safe place for them to stay…

In a way, it is easy to accept. The way that a cat might simple walk away one day, deliberately. You knew it went away to die alone. You just knew. Cats did that. Wardens did that. Anders, whatever he was at the end, did that, too.

She doesn’t cry for him. She is calm, numb.

Mid-day, after a flurried morning, they began to pack up the site, no one really speaking out of respect. Nola comes at them, red brows furrowed, and starts unpacking what had been put away. She pulls out clothes and pots and pans… whatever she can lift. Then men try to take things back, but she darts around the site with items clutched to her chest, refusing to give them up, to let this happen.

Finally Hawke grabs her, smoothing her hair. She sees Anders' ring tied around Nola's neck on a leather tie. Hawke tries to explain… but it doesn’t make sense. Not in words. It couldn’t. _How do you explain this to a child?_ She feels tears stinging at the back of her eyes for the first time in years.

“Papa won’t find us if we leave!”

Frustrated and angry, Nola runs from her into the woods, tiny uncontrolled silver sparks dancing at her fingertips, a external manifestation of the storm inside. It doesn’t help the situation, the new magic in her only pushes her further into a panic… makes the loss of him hurt more, seem scarier.

Nola runs and Hawke follows. She’s not had a chance to bathe, and she feels him still on her skin, between her legs… smells him on her fingers.

He said goodbye to her, she just didn’t realize it.


	15. Chapter 15

“I read only a little. Still after all this time. I’ve never said it… but I wanted to say thank you for teaching him.”

“Think nothing of it,” Isabela hands me the bottle of deceptively good wine, “I actually quite enjoy having someone else around who reads.”

The wood of the deck feels solid below me, sturdy and bearing the echo of the sea below us, “And what, exactly, do you both read?”

“Only the most age appropriate works, of course.”

Fox smirks at this from his perch above us.

“Of course.”

He is my flesh and my bone, I see it in him more and more each day. Tall, like his mother's line, he has flourished on the sea… a thing I would not have anticipated. Perhaps it is Isabela's influence more than the sea… perhaps the two are one and the same.

 _She found us. Tan and round and glittering… virtually unchanged from when I last saw her. Isabela. She was a surprisingly welcome sight as she took the seat across from us in a tavern in Cumberland._

 _“Here I was thinking just this morning that things were starting to get a little dull…” she took my drink, peered in and seeing that it was near empty, “Thought you were more of a red wine man, Fenris.” She rose with a crooked smile. Pausing, she looked at Fox who sits beside me, “And what are you having, sweetheart? Always room on my tab for one more.”_

 _He had looked at my tankard in her hands and arched his brows, looking at her expectantly._

 _“Strong silent type, huh? I like that.”_

 _“Milk for him, Isabela.”_

 _“Uh-huh, sure, milk” she winked at him and saunters over to the bar._

 _We’d come there on a hunch, a rumor I’d heard about the figures currently being touted as The Father and The Mother of the Revolution being here._

 _Of course, they weren’t._

 _She returned, placing my drink in front of my folded hands and then maneuvering two smaller tumblers in front of Fox._

 _“It’s milk,” she said with a defensive air, then with a smirk, “In one. And a little ale in the other.”_

 _He drank the ale first, quick, before I could stop him. Then nodded approvingly, as if the ale mes the high standards of his palette._

 _“I’d heard you were on the road,” she chewed delicately on one thumb, “and not alone.”_

 _“Isabela, Fox. Fox, this is Isabela.”_

 _She extended her hand to him, and he took it, giving it one firm shake._

 _“Maker’s breath, he looks just like you,” she shook her head, “You boys looking for Hawke?”_

 _“The Mother, you mean? She’s underground.”_

 _“They both are.”_

 _I focus on her, “Do you know where?”_

 _“I’m above ground, myself… sea level these days. I haven’t been ashore in almost a month. So… no. I’ve not been keeping track. Or hunting.”_

 _“You know anyone involved?”_

 _“No. Not anymore.” She watched Fox, and I saw a smile in her eyes that never quite made it to the rest of her face, “Come with me. I can’t promise we’ll hunt her, but I get around… we can keep our ear to the underground along the way.”_

 _“Why would you want us?”_

 _“I miss her, too” she said simply, as if it were obvious._

Fox took to her as if he’d known her his entire life, and she to him. The cuffs along the outer shell of his round ears are a brass, silver and gold testament to the lifestyle he has embraced with her. On the sea, he is not just a vagabond half-blood… he is a rogue with aspirations of becoming a pirate.

He watches the horizon, breathes it… for him, life has been nothing but the pursuit of that thin line between worlds… Years spent with Isabela have proved one thing to him, that the horizon is always there… never touched, never broken.

Hawke is my horizon, still. I don’t believe that she is his.

“Fenris…”

I look from Fox to her. Her mouth is quirked at a funny angle.

She leans forward and kisses me. Her lips taste of salt air and wine.

“What are you doing?”

“Saying goodbye now while I have the chance.”

“What?”

“I know where she is,” she traces my bottom lip with her thumb, “We’re going to port, and then it should only be another two days travel inland for you. Both of you. ”

I feel his eyes on the back of my neck.

“…are you certain?”

“Absolutely."

Then, just then, I see it… what Fox was watching for so intently. He misses it, his attention now on us. As the sun slips beneath the edge of the world, a brief green flash. It is old magic. Magic that exists just there, on the horizon.


	16. Chapter 16

He had not been dead long. The body was still warm.

He had watched one last sunset, propped against the trunk of a tree. We stand side by side in the road, Fox and I, and the road is quiet.

The body is untroubled. There is no longer a man or a spirit inside of it. It is just a thing.

I feel nothing towards him, not hate, just apathy. But I grimace at the reality that if he is here and dead... Hawke may well be far from here... not within two days walk as promised.

He looks older, but the his skin is pink, healthy. It was never so when I knew him, gnawed at inside by the corrupt spirit he was foolish enough to let inside.

This is a man free of his ghost.

A white ring of flesh circles one of the fingers curled around a small vial that still smells strongly of dry sweet poison… he had worn a band there for a long time. Nothing else seems to be disturbed… he was not robbed.

I imagine he left it with her.

Fox tilts his head, a curious look on his face.

A wind ruffles the mage’s hair, like wheat in a field.

 _Did you know this man, Da?_

Fox still speaks with his hands, but after years together, I hardly need to look at them at all to know what he’s saying. I hear what is unsaid.

“I did.”

He looks at me, and frowns.

The boy has seen death before… he doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it.

 _How?_

“He saved your mother’s life.”

He nods, then looks back to the body. Anders’ eyes are open; fixed on a horizon gone dark.

Fox steps towards him, and kneels, reaching out with two fingertips and closing his lids.

 _Thank you. Go in peace._

He’s seen me do this… a service to the dead. I watch him and I am awed, seeing him then as a boy on the earliest cusp of becoming a man.

I hear hooves and turn. Fox stands, shifting his hand cautiously to the blade he keeps at his side… a parting gift from Isabela.

A white horse at a gallop in the twilight seems unreal in this land. I have not seen one in years… Fox has, to the best of my knowledge, never seen one. It is strange and beautiful, like something in a dream.

The rider’s face is set, and I can tell at a hundred yards who it is.

“Fenris?”

Sebastian’s voice carries a rougher edge than I remember.

He slows, and I see the weathered skin of his face, the hard blue eyes focused not on me or Fox, but on the unmoving figure of Anders.

“Damn him!” he seethes, the horse shying anxiously in place, “Damn the bastard!”

He dismounts, his gauntleted hand gripping the reins like a vice.

“Did he poison himself? Coward!”

He starts toward the body then halts, turning to me, “Did he send you a damned raven as well? Did he tell you to meet him here?!”

“No.”

“No? Well he sent one to me… bastard.”

He came alone. His army occupied in more legitimate battles.

He sounds weary. For Sebastian, the last five years have been long, as Circles fell and the apostates rallied behind the idea of Anders and his cause. Five years of killing on both sides. And it ended there, that night, without even the chance to kill the man himself.

The war had, as all children do, grown and matured and no longer truly needs it’s father… a fact which the mage had to have understood.

“What will you do now, Sebastian?”

His jaw is tight, “Can’t execute a dead man. Put his head on a pike and call it a victory? I don’t know… you know he was a Grey Warden once. They’re supposed to die fighting in the dark, protecting the world, not burning it down…” he looks at me, then at Fox, “What are you doing here, Fenris?”

“Does this continue for you? After this night, will you keep hunting?”

 _For Hawke?_ I do not say her name.

He looks at Fox again, seeing him, “You found him?”

I move between instinctively between him and Fox though the Prince of Starkhaven makes no motion towards him.

“No. I won’t hunt her. It’s him I wanted--”

“It’s as easy as that?”

“This war isn’t over…” his fist clenches at his side, “but I’m tired of killing. Do you know where she is?”

I say nothing.

“I don’t want her dead. I’d have done it to get him… don’t misunderstand me. I’d have done it if that’s what it took. But now…” he hands me the reins and stalks to the body, lifting it across his shoulders. He lays Anders across the horses’ back, lashing him in place with a rope.

“Go to her then. I don’t want her blood. Or the child’s. As far as I know, they’re both dead here tonight… it’s over.”

“The child?”

“Aye. Their daughter.”

“Hawke--” I stop myself, thinking of the dark empty wound in her belly, but he is ignoring me regardless, looking at Anders, “I told her… he was selfish. She didn’t listen. Maybe she couldn’t hear me. I hope… I hope she’s well. I hope that now she can be free of him.”

Sebastian takes his trophy with him, and I wonder if he believes himself to be a scavenger or if he will convince himself that he is still a hunter as he journeys on.


	17. Chapter 17

“That was good, Nola. Very good!”

Hawke and Nola lay on their backs on a blanket stretched out on the gentle slope of the hill near the house. Rabbit sleeps at her side. A clear night sky stretches above them, endless and littered with tiny jewels and diamonds and bits of sea glass.

They have lived here one month… in peace. The stillness had, at first, left Hawke anxious… but she was now growing accustomed to it. She had started work on a garden that day, and her hands feel sore and raw from the work... but good. _The earth is good here_.

Nola traces a ghostly image of waves in the air in front of her, shimmery and roughly drawn… a child’s magic trick… not something taught to mages in the Circle, thought there to be a childish waste of energy… but Malcolm Hawke had done this with her and with Bethany… like learning to draw shapes before letters, letters before words.

Hawke draws a ship, a great pirate galleon in three dimensions that skips and soars over Nola’s simple waves, and she giggles.

“It’s so pretty, Mama!”

Nola’s fingers absently go to the silver band around a leather tie at her neck, and she sighs.

The waves fade and disappear, and Hawke’s ship appears stranded now without a sea to support it.

She waves her hand and the ships sails on, away from them, toward the trees at the bottom of the hill.

***

Fox walks ahead of me, he prefers that now. He is a skilled tracker with an keen sense of direction. I think he hears things that others do not... nothing extrasensory. He just listens differently. He sniffs at the air which is fresh and clean here… a beautiful piece of countryside.

A glow catches his eye through the trees… a flickering light, moving smoothly and silently through the air.

He freezes, alert, as do I… but there is nothing menacing about this figment.

 _It’s a ship!_ he looks at me, excited.

It’s Hawke.

“Hawke!” my voice is strained, unsteady, and Fox looks at me oddly.

I break into a run, past Fox who is quick to catch up, close at my heels.

My heart pounds, trapped in the frail mortal cage of my body. The ship is still, as if in port, but it does not fade or disappear.

I run past it, off the path, pushing through branches. I run, and for the first time in a long time, I feel the energy of the earth through my feet, pulse up through the muscles of my legs, into my blood, into my heart and my brain. I run like a wolf… but not towards a kill. I run and it feels pure and good to have my son run behind me. We run free.

I break through the barriers of the trees and the air opens before me, endless and clean… a place with no death and no war. A place with Hawke.

She is standing, barefoot, dressed in undyed linen.

I gaze up at her and the endless sky blends into the black of her hair, stars in her eyes.

A girl is there, behind her legs, and she has one arm protectively held against the child. But she is calm… serene.

“Hawke!”

“Fenris!?”

I cannot move. She stares at me, seeing all of me… and I can’t breathe.

She picks up the child and rests her on her hip, then descends towards me. My hands ache to feel that she is real.

It is then, as she is nearly to me, that Fox bursts from the trees like a spark from a fire, his face bright and happy, a flush blazing across his tan cheeks.

She lets out a startled gasp and freezes.

She stares at him, blinking quickly, then sets the girl down on her feet before her knees give way, and she folds, fawnlike. The girl clings tight to her arm, “Mama!”

I go to her then, and she takes my hand, “Fenris?”

“I found him, Hawke.”

She cups a trembling hand against my cheek and she smells like fresh grass and clean skin, and I press into the touch, “His name is Fox.”

“ _Fox?_ ” she says his name but it more a breath than a spoken word. She looks at him, “I never thought…”

Fox fidgets anxiously, uncomfortable.

“Mama?” the little girl is on her other side.

“It’s okay, sweetheart. This is Fenris. And this is… Fox!” she laughs and it sounds like a sob.

Fox glares at me past her. I gesture for him to come closer.

“No… no, he doesn’t have to…” she wipes tears from her cheeks, “I look like a madwoman right now… I wouldn’t want to come any closer either!”

“Who is Fenris and Fox, Mama?”

Hawke, smoothes a hand over the girl’s hair, “Do you remember the stories that Papa told you about the brave wolf?”

She nods.

“Well, this is the wolf.”

She looks up at me, a gap-toothed smile, “There wasn’t a Fox in the stories.”

“There was… he just didn’t know about him.”

 _What stories?_ Fox shifts, his thick brows lowered.

“Maybe… you could tell me your stories… and I could elaborate on the parts with Fox,” I say to the girl. Then to Hawke, “What’s her name?”

“Nola!” the girl answers. I see the silver ring tied around her neck.

If this is the life that Anders somehow managed to leave for Hawke… then I am grateful to him.

“I’ve waited a long time to meet you, Fox,” Hawke says, rising elegantly to her feet.

Fox takes a few carefully placed steps closer.

He extends his hand, and she takes it.

I look down at my wrist. The layers of fabric are still there… badly torn and frayed, the red fading, the white linen strip dirty. I touch them both, feeling as though the power that they had once held is gone…

The girl is beside me, nervously fingering the silver ring that was Anders' and is now hers. She watches Hawke who is already beginning to understand Fox’s signs.

We keep these things… tokens. Talismans. They are a part of a person we can hold and touch and feel even when the person is gone, slipped beyond some horizon we can never seem to reach.

I watch Hawke brush a rogue lock of hair from Fox’s face as he excitedly tells her about the ship in the woods, and the ship he called home.

I move to sit closer to the girl, who is beginning to look increasingly forlorn the longer that Hawke’s attention is rapt to Fox.

She looks up at me, and I smile at her. I will not see this child come to harm anymore than Fox. She is Hawke’s. And so… from that moment on, she is mine as well. This is my family.

“Fenris…” I look to Hawke, who is smirking at me, “is it true that Isabela taught him how to drink an Antivan Rose?”

“Yes.”

“He’s ten!”

“We were at sea.”

“Maker’s breath!” she laughs, and I see Fox smiling proudly behind her., “I could use and Antivan Rose right about now, come to think of it…”

She runs her hands through her hair, “Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“Come inside, eat…” she comes to Nola, and kisses her head, "Nola, you can show Fox your books."

The girl grins, and nods. I see Fox's eyes light at the promise of a library of any kind.

I stand, and brush grass from my fingers.

Nola starts walking, a tan mabari loping alongside her, to the house which glows with a warm cozy light, and Fox follows her, giving me a last glance… only the slightest bit wary.

“Stay.”

Hawke is close to me, her breath warm and a live on my skin, her hands in my hands.

“As long as you’ll have me.”

“There’s so much… he doesn’t speak?”

“No.”

“Who did it, Fenris? I’ve had these dreams, for years…”

“Does it matter now? I will tell you… if that is what you want.”

She runs her thumb along my brow, “Maybe. Not tonight. But some day..." She takes my hands in her own, which tremble, "He's beautiful."

"He is my blood and my heart, Hawke."

"I've never stopped--"

I kiss her, unaccustomed to such a delicate gesture after so long.

But her lips are soft and real as the breath that flows from her lungs into my own.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Mumford & Sons' 'Sigh No More':
> 
> "Love it will not betray you  
> Dismay or enslave you, it will set you free"


End file.
